Re: Breeding Season
but the risk of being harassed by some prosecutor who got nothing better to do is still there.
This. I wonder sometimes if people realize that if law enforcement takes an interest in you, you lose regardless of whether a court finds you guilty or not.
(long rant about the US criminal justice system follows)
You can easily spend weeks in jail without committing a crime. While there you will be confined in a small space with the genuine scum of the Earth, who are there for actual crimes like robbing banks and cooking meth. There's plenty of opportunities for them to assault you and even rob you*, and the prison staff don't care. Hope you weren't carrying a large sum of cash when you were arrested.
If you manage to get out of jail somehow and not lose all your money, you don't get any cash you had back. You get a check. Hope you're not out of town and using the money for travel expenses, because if you're forced to cash it there the local bank will help itself to a nice chunk of it.
So you have some of your cash back and walk across town to the impound lot where your car was towed to. Say goodbye to at least a hundred dollars just for the tow, nevermind the storage fee for however long you were locked up for.
The charges against you are bullshit, so you decide to go talk to the prosecutor to see if you can get them dropped. While you're off doing that (turns out he isn't in his office), the police notice your parked vehicle. They don't like that you're out on bail after they went to the trouble of arresting you, so they wait for you to come back, arrest you again on additional bullshit charges (pointing a gun at your head even though you're not doing anything threatening), take your cash and tow your car. You're back at square one.
A month or so later you finally go to trial. The entire police department is in attendance to testify against you. The prosecutor is fully aware that the charges are bullshit and drops them without argument, on the condition the police keep a few legal but vaguely suspicious (and expensive) items they confiscated from you.
Do you get the time you spent in jail back? Nope.
Do you get the money stolen from you back? Nope.
Do you get the check cashing fees back? Nope.
Do you get the impound fees back? Nope.
Do you get the confiscated items back? Nope.
Do you get any attorney fees back? Nope.
Do you get any expenses and penalties that have accumulated on the life you haven't been living back? Nope.
Do you have any recourse for the ass-reaming the government has given you? Nope.
Depending on where you are, you might have to pay fees to the court and jail too. Even though you're not guilty of anything. All of your information is now in the national criminal databases with the bullshit charges next to it (even though they were dropped), so any encounter you have any government agency for many years in the future, thousands of miles away, are going to be flavored by it. In their minds you are guilty of what you were charged with. It will limit the opportunities that would otherwise be open to you.
All of this, I am speaking from first-hand experience. To be fair the area was a corrupt hell-hole and this wouldn't happen in most reasonable places, but the point is that all it takes is a single cop who believes he has probable cause to completely disrupt your life.
I was lucky and missed out on the real life ruiner: damage to your reputation among your peers and business partners. The police and media will happily broadcast your name, face and alleged crime to everyone, on television and the Internet, prior to a conviction. There are numerous websites whose business model is taking mugshots from jail websites and making them permanently show up at the top of Google search results, to blackmail the accused to pay a fee to get it removed. Everyone in your life is now aware of what you allegedly did. Family members will probably understand that the charges were bullshit, but your landlord, employer and neighbors might not be as understanding.
You do not have to be convicted of a crime to have your life derailed by law enforcement.
* No, you don't have your money while you're in jail. The jail may keep it in an account for you. You can order stuff like twinkies and ramen with it. Or, your cellmates can steal your account information while you're sleeping and order twinkies and ramen for you. A hundred dollars worth. The jail will happily fill the order and force you to pay for it.
(end of long rant)
Just an irk of mine about peoples' dismissal of the seriousness of things that are legally grey, that can get you charged/arrested but not formally convicted. Not expressing an opinion on the main topic of content creators restricting their works in fear of the law.